Great Plains Bill of Materials Setup &
Customization for Process Manufacturing – overview for consultant
By Andrew
Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918
help@albaspectrum.com
Microsoft Great Plains
has full-featured Manufacturing suite of modules:
Capacity Requirements Planning,
Job Costing, Master
Production Scheduling,
Materials Requirements Planning,
etc. However Microsoft Great Manufacturing serves so-called discrete
manufacturing market niche. At the same time Great Plains fits to mid-size
companies, where manufacturing processes might be categorized as light
assembly. One of our clients, mid-size crane trucks manufacturing facility
recently outsourced all the parts assembly to overseas partners and concentrated
on sales, distribution, leasing and only light final assembly. This small
article describes you how you could deploy Microsoft Great Plains Bill or
Materials in process manufacturing. We will describe combination of Sales Order
Processing (SOP) module to get customer orders, Bill of Materials (BOM) to
assembly for the order, Inventory Control (IV) to allocate materials and
Purchase Order Processing (POP) to replenish inventory
- Order Taking.
In SOP you create Sales Order and you use standard functionality – place order
in the batch and then upon the completion you transfer order to Invoice to
bill the customer. If you participate in international business, you should
take advantage from Multicurrency (MC) feature, expanded on SOP (Euro, Yen,
Yuan, Peso, Real, etc.).
- Manufacturing.
In the case of light process or discrete manufacturing we recommend you to
call Bill of Materials engine upon the saving of Sales Order to allocate
assembled part into final product. This is classical Great Plains Dexterity
customization, which should be tuned to your specific customer needs and this
work could be done by Great Plains Dexterity Source Code partner only.
- Catch Weight.
If you are in process manufacturing – your raw materials are purchased in
random weight units, and you need to account them in these units: cases,
rolls, casks, etc. Typical solution in Great Plains is to have Great Plains
Dexterity custom logic to associate the cask with Serial or Lot Number and
record it in your inventory in pounds or kilograms. In this case you can
return defective unit back to your supplier, identifying it by serial number
and make correct inventory adjustment
- POP/Replenishment.
Purchase Order Processing has PO Generator to automate replenishment by ABC
code, reorder level and other criteria
- Inventory
Adjustments. In process
manufacturing you have variable input to get fixed output. The simplest way
to realize the variances – make Inventory adjustment transactions on the
regular basis.
- Reporting.
As the solution we recommend is definitely budget one, lacking functionality
should be covered with accurate and flexible reporting. We recommend you
to have Crystal Reports programmer helping you in pilot project. Be sure
that she/he has good knowledge/experience to work with Microsoft Great Plains
tables structure.
Good luck and you can
always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support.
Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief
Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains,
Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona,
Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe,
Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports
and Microsoft CRM SDK developer